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Treading with Purpose
I continue to “play” Fallout 76 (F76). It’s really more akin to treading, but it suffices.
Caps are the universal currency in F76, and there is a daily vendor cap for… Caps. Basically, since nearly everything that isn’t nailed down can be sold, Bethesda decided there should be some limiter involved so someone doesn’t grind or glitch their way to the hard, player cap of 25,000c. It used to be each faction vendor had a 200c limit, but that was changed to be a universal 1400c, resetting daily.
Actually having 1400c worth of shit to sell isn’t impossible, but it requires some grinding slash borderline exploitative practices. One of the easier methods is finding the plans for the Marine Tactical Helmet and then crafting a bunch of those. I just so happened to locate the plans the first time I looked for them, and now can create a helmet for 1 glass, 1 plastic, and 3 rubber, then sell it to a vendor for 28c apiece. Getting 150 Rubber each day is not technically a struggle, but it has been. One of the best sources of Rubber is a school building that spawns a bunch of Kickballs in the gym. Alternatively, there is also a river shop that has a bunch of life preservers that can also be scrapped for Rubber and Plastic.
Unfortunately, as these are the best places for collecting vast amounts of these resources, and the Marine Tactical Helmet is the most straight-forward way of getting Caps, they are often swept clean before I ever show up. One can “server hop” by exiting to the main menu, but that’s also what everyone else does when they find those places empty too.
There is technically an easier helmet to craft and sell – the Civil War Hat – but the plans for those are a random spawn on a corpse that is itself a random spawn.
The end result is that I spent a not-insignificant amount of time in loading screens as I play F76. Checking the school gym, fast traveling to the Overseer’s Camp (near one confirmed random spawn location for the Civil War Hat), fast traveling to the river shop, then server hopping. To break the monotony, I’ll also hit up player bases along the way and check out their wares. Then repeat.
“But… why?”
Part of it is fear of missing out, specifically regarding the 1400c from vendors. With an angry baby at home, I do not always have the opportunity to play F76 or any game each day. So when I do find 30 minutes or less, I definitely want to drain those vendors before doing anything else. Considering that players can and are selling 3-star Legendary items in their Camps, gaining these Caps is basically the equivalent of farming Legendaries without actually having to do so directly. There is a question about why I care about better gear when I’m not actually “playing the game,” but that conundrum exists in any MMO anyway. “Defeat the boss for gear that makes it easier to defeat the boss.”
The other part is that playing F76 this way is still better than playing any other game at the moment. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is right out if I can barely finish one fight and one dialog box before having to put the game down. Oxygen Not Included could be an option, but there is a big content update that was scheduled for this month, but got moved to July. The latest Humble Bundle includes Streets of Rogue and Graveyard Keeper and a few other games that I was interested in, but I just sat and looked at the purchase button before closing the window. When could I even play these games? Can all them be paused/saved at any time?
Fallout 76 is perhaps worst out of those options given there is no pausing or saving at all. But in terms of “value” for time spent, it definitely is at the top of my list, still. Plus, you know, I still like the game. So I will keep treading, and do some swimming when I can.
More Gold Strategies in Wildstar
I successfully purchased my first free month of game-time in Wildstar last week with a buy order of 2.25p. In case you’re wondering, there is indeed a fee for putting up a buy order, because sinkception.
Because why not.
Given how my highest character is level 23, you might be wondering how I did this. In no particular order, here are some of my gold-making methods:
1) Sell all the decor. I’ve gone over this before, but you should also get a feel for what’s on the AH in addition to vendor price. For example, one of the things that put me over the top was a 25g sell order for an Ikthian Holding Tank. I have no idea what that is other than the fact(s) that it vendors for 1.83s, I won it from a Housing Challenge, and there were none on the AH. In retrospect, perhaps I should have put it up for 1p and seen what happened.
2) Similar to the above: selling Dyes. Specifically, selling the Dye Collections (e.g. don’t open them) you can get from Housing Challenge rewards. This actually might be on its way out as a strategy on my server; they used to sell for 5g apiece all day long, but are now approaching 1g. That can still be a lot of money, just like with the nerfed-but-still-75s-apiece Challenge rewards I talked about a few weeks ago. The one that seems to still retain its value on my server is the Ikthia Collection, which hovers around 6g.
3) Tradeskill Reagents. In one of those WoW-esque bizarro scenarios in which you sell things to people capable of making it themselves, I was making a HUGE profit margin with Weaponsmithing, specifically making the Condensers (i.e. Titanium Elemental Condenser). Only Weaponsmiths can make this item and only Weaponsmiths can use it, so… the market for them should literally be zero. And yet it’s not. I actually blame Carbine for this, as their crafting interface is a steaming pile of unintelligible garbage, but I’m not above selling things people shouldn’t really have a need to purchase.
4) Abusing Buy/Sell Orders. This isn’t so much “abuse” as it is “profit-extraction,” but it basically entails noticing when a wide gulf exists between Buy and Sell Orders. For example, many AMPs have a Buy Order of 10s (below vendor price even before fees!) and a Sell Order of 2g or whatever. So I come in, create a Buy Order for 15s out of the goodness of my heart, then turn around and sell any that people inexplicably dump on the AH, for less than the best Sell Order. It’s passive, it’s not guaranteed, and it takes up a lot of your ridiculously limited Trade Orders (25 max)… but it works often enough that I’m on the lookout for such opportunities.
Provide no value, get paid.
A rather ridiculous non-AMP example I have is with Roan Steaks. I only actually knew about this meat drop because I was trying to figure out if there was any reason to level cooking, and it was one of the requirements in the Tech Tree. At the time, the ~1s buyout price was nothing compared to the money I was making via Challenge decor vendoring, so I put in a 200 item Buy order at like 1.1s. A week later, I noticed that Roan Steaks had a Sell Order of 30s apiece. I sold all of them. To be clear, I turned 2.2g into 57.8g in the equivalent of a penny stock windfall.
Not only is this still occurring, by the way, I’m pretty sure by this point reselling meat has been responsible for half of my total wealth.
5) Vendoring crafted goods. Tobold actually wrote about this several times, but you can occasionally get X profit per cycle crafting and vendoring the product, depending on AH prices. For example, Fine Titanium Cleaver requires 6 Titanium, a Low Viscosity Flux for 5.27 silver, and a Sapphire Power Core. If you use Refined Sapphire Powers Cores, e.g. a blue one, the result is a blue version of the weapon, which vendors for more. In this case, any time the combination of 6 Titanium and Refined Sapphire Power Cores is less than ~55s, you profit the difference.
Even though this is effectively endless profit, I personally feel I can earn more money faster via other means, up to and including just killing mobs in the world. You can usually pack in more profit by creating your own Power Cores, but at some point it might be better to simply sell the Power Cores than adding the extra step.
6) Vendor everything else. Ever complete a Challenge and then get wildly disappointed by randomly getting the Salvaged Loot bag? It’s not actually a disaster: each of the random crap items you receive sells for 5s or more apiece. The last loot bag I opened actually had 45s worth of “vendor trash.” That’s, you know, almost half a gold right there. Also, if you find yourself looking at regular quest rewards and not seeing an upgrade, make sure to pick the one that vendors for more; it’s almost always the Heavy Armor piece. It all adds up eventually.
7) Runes. I only recently discovered this opportunity, and right now it’s both low-demand and low-competition on my server. Basically, Runes are the equivalent of Gems in WoW but, bizarrely, everyone can craft them. All you need are the mats and some idea of which ones are selling high.
$_$
In the above example, Rune of Finesse has a current price of 20g. There aren’t any Buy Orders, so theoretically the demand is questionable. Regardless, four Rune Fragments, two Signs of Air, and one Major Sign of Air costs barely 3g on my server AH. In other words, the potential margins can be HUGE.
Rune Fragments are the typical bottleneck for this, as the only really reliable source of getting them is via Salvaging, which necessarily requires you to gamble the vendor price of the item. If Rune Fragments are expensive on your server though, they can be their own source of profit; just follow this video by Noxious. So, really, you should be covered on both end of things – either Rune Fragments are cheap and you can craft a bunch to sell, or they are expensive and you make money creating them.
8) Level Up. Although this is clearly not the route I have been taking, gold is easier to come by the closer to the cap you get. At level 50, you earn Elder Points for each full XP bar you earn, up to a certain weekly cap. Beyond that? All extra XP is converted to gold. This is on top of gold from daily quests, mob kills, vendoring level 50 loot, and so on. Worst comes to worst, you could vendor the tier 4/5 mats you get from mining (etc) to the tune of 50s+ per node.
So there you have it. Between this guide and my first one, you should not really have any trouble getting a comfortable level of wealth in Wildstar, even before the level cap.
Street CREDD
Wildstar’s EVE-like CREDD system is currently and unexpectedly active. Current price on my server? About 200g (or 2p, but that doesn’t feel as impressive).
Accurate as of today.
There was a huge Architect nerf the day after I posted my guide, which reduced the vendor price of Decor by 40% (I did update it though). Apparently my bulletproof Challenge strategy was small potatoes compared with people earning +20p by vendoring decor crafted with below-vendor prices of ore/wood dumped by gatherers. On the one hand, I understand the need to not break the economy. On the other hand… 10 CREDD is $150 that I just missed out on.
It is an open question whether I would be playing Wildstar 10 months from now anyway. The truth is that I don’t know. Yesterday, I played it all day. Guys, I can’t even remember the last time I played one game for the entirety of my free time after work. Well, obviously, it was probably WoW, but still! Even though I think I prefer having a few small games that I work on each day, there isn’t much that can beat that feeling of delighting in bodily immersing yourself in a game.
“Challenge complete” is the sound of my addiction.
And yet I am only level 18. I haven’t bothered with Adventures or even reading up on Dungeons, as I’m getting enough horror stories vicariously from Reddit. My ex-WoW friends haven’t logged on in a few days which, if nothing else, indicates they are not as deep into the game as I am. But am I even in that deep? I’m mining, playing the AH, and doing circuits of housing Challenges every 30 minutes or so. That’s still good, right? I mean, other than the fact that that pretty much describes my pattern of behavior in my twilight WoW months.
My nominal Wildstar goal is to get enough gold to purchase CREDD before having to enter any credit card info. At the current price, I am about 25% of the way there. It is entirely possible that I won’t be able to keep up with the presumed increase in demand as the game nears its 30-day mark. Or maybe my long-shot decor listing at 1p apiece (I was the only person listing the items) will result in a CREDD purchase tomorrow. Or maybe look shiny shiny I wonder if my Challenges have reset?
Err… so yeah. That’s been this whole week.
Making Gold in Wildstar
If there is one thing that I hate in MMO websites, it is when people allude to the fact that they are making gold (etc) but never explaining how. What’s the point? Bragging rights? In fact, that frustration was my part of my impetus for creating Player Vs Auction House way back in the day (which later morphed into this site).
Preamble aside, allow me the great pleasure of presenting one bulletproof gold-making method in Wildstar and two more that depend on the obliviousness of AH shoppers:
No assembly (usually) required.
“But I’m not an Architect!” “The AH is flooded with these things!”
No, my friend. Sell them to… the vendors.
Bulletproof Method: Challenges
[Edit]: Carbine has since nerfed the vendor prices for many decor items, including the ones listed below, to about 60% of their prior value. The strategy still works, but not as quickly.
Extremely early on while leveling, I noticed that some of the Challenge options were awarding Decor. It’s kinda hard to get a handle on how valuable the Decor would be on the AH without seeing what it looks like, but there was one language I understood immediately: vendor price.
I’m going to be presenting you an Algoroc map to give you a few chances to nab the Chua-Tech Loading Arm (1.31g 79s) and the Shardspire Canyon FABkit (1.23g 74.1s). The following farming route is for Exiles only; I’m going to assume that a similar route exists for Dominion, but I have no such characters. Here it is:
Money Run #1
In text form:
- Swiftpaw Slayer: Kill the wolves. Since this is a fairly early-level quest, you might actually have a hard time finding enough mobs depending on the number of other players.
- Skug Egg Destroyer: Kill the spider-looking eggs that alert/explode when you get nearby. You can typically dodge all the normal mobs in here and just kill eggs, which only have a few hundred HP.
- Scrap Yard: Pick up items off ground. It is highly recommended that you finish area story first. Once finished, 90% of the mobs in the area go neutral, which makes it considerably easier to pick up the scrap. Don’t bother with trying for gold-level; just click the “x” once you hit silver.
- Skittering Slaughter: Kill the spiders. The lone spider mobs seem to count for more, but I’m not sure. As before, don’t bother going higher than silver medal. There’s technically another easy Challenge in here to run through eggs, but it’s only worth about ~24s.
There you go. The exact odds are unknown, but silver medals give you a 4x higher chance of getting the decor. Nab all four, and you’ll walk away with over 5g 3g in vendor loot for something that likely took you less than 10 minutes (assuming mount, already completed area). Challenges can be repeated every 30 minutes. The one downside of this reset period is that time only counts down while you are online.
And why the hell not, here are two more in Celestion that can award the same items:
Money Run #2
In text form:
- Dancing with Data: Perform a DDR-esque mini-game. If it’s your first time here, you’ll need to complete the quest at the same console to unlock the challenge. I recommend using the default Ctrl-F1-F3 buttons rather than trying to mouse-click them.
- Licking Lolli-Lopps: Click the mushrooms. This is actually a bit harder than it sounds, as you receive a low-gravity buff and have a tendency to lose all forward momentum when running around. There are some mushrooms higher up in the trees, but they’re tricky. High chance of out-right failure if there are other people doing this one.
Nab both, walk away with 2.5g. Nab all six, and you’re looking at possibly 7.5g 4.5g every 30 minutes until you can’t stand it any more. There’s always a chance the dice roll against you, but it sure beats whatever the hell else you were doing to make gold.
…or maybe not:
Vendoring the AH
That’s right, my friends. Despite the fact that most items default to their vendor price when you list them, somehow the AH gets stocked up with below vendor priced goods. While I fully expect things to be fixed soon – either with a patch or an add-on that will vacuum all these deals automatically – for now just keep in mind to check the vendor price when looking at items. For example:
Three-way profit.
There are actually three ways to profit here.
- Straight-up buy items to vendor. I don’t recommend vendoring mats (see below), but if you’re looking for quick cash, this is literally free money.
- Check Bid prices to see if they’re beneath vendor. This FABkit, for example, had a bid price of 1g and yet vendors for 1.79g. The guy was actually trying to sell it at 5g or whatever with his Buyout Price, so technically you could try and flip it if that’s your style. For now, I’ll take 79s profit for tying up 1g for ~24 hours or so. Also, keep in mind that just bidding for shit is a good way to nab normally expensive things.
- Create Buy Orders for less than vendor. This one is a bit trickier, because there is a minimum charge of 5s for Buy Orders; in other words, you’ll definitely want to put in a large order and otherwise do the math to make sure you’re coming out ahead. In my case, I basically put in an order for 100 of these items (it really doesn’t matter what they are) and each one I get is +1s to me. Low-margin, sure, but the overall principal can scale to whatever size you please.
Here’s a third-level method to making gold, and the one I assume many “I can’t tell you” players are doing:
Crafting the AH
One again, we’re focusing on ultimately selling things to vendors. But instead of looking at mats to vendor, we’re looking at mats to craft into vendor bait. Example:
Something like this, but better.
The above isn’t actually the best example, as the margin is (relatively) razor-thin here; mats cost 15.93s (2.6*3 + 8.13) and final product vendors for 24.87s, for a net profit of 8.94s. Will you churn through the crafting interface for almost 9s a cycle? Maybe. There’s crafting XP in it for whomever would rather do this than find a tree that drops Ironbark wood. Due to the nature of crafting, you might be able to toss a few copper towards additives that can morph the final product into a slightly more valuable vendor good.
The other professions should work the same in principal, although I don’t currently have a non-beginner Weaponsmith (etc) to try it out. Just keep in mind that all of the various components (Power Cores, etc) have their own costs, and also the vendor price seems to be a function of the overall stats of the item. For example, I “over-charged” a weapon (adding more stat points at the cost of chance of failure) and it increased the vendor price by 2s. Might not sound like much, but these margins can become important later.
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In any case, there you go: three methods of making gold in Wildstar. Needless to say, I highly recommend Challenge farming. It is profession agnostic, simple, and relies on nothing more than Carbine not nerfing anything. I have identified six Challenges worth more than a gold apiece, right in the starter zone for Exiles – now that you know about them, you can keep an eye out for similar payout in future Challenges for yourself.
In An Age 